


In times like these

by Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Happy Ending, One Shot, Romantic Angst, a riff on a theme, poetic or just drafty who knows, post a racist or weird comment and I swear I'll delete it, tiny mention of ptsd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-10-21 14:22:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20695001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome/pseuds/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome
Summary: In times like these, to people like them, words like Home mean much more.Jyn/Cassian ficlet.





	In times like these

Cassian says,_ welcome home_ and Jyn doesn’t believe him.

How could she, when she had met so many liars before him? How could she, in times like these? For people like her, there’s no home. There’s no such thing as a welcome. For people like her, the only welcome she hears is at the end of a transaction, and it's never said sincerely.

But he had been sincere, and she had seen his face when he had said it. Had he seen hers? What truths had it revealed that she had tried so hard to hide? What had she lost, when he had looked at her like that?

And worse yet, what had she started to hope for?

Words, at least, kind words like those had been, were usually used as weapons, at least for as long as Jyn could remember. Or almost as long as she could remember. There had been kind words, in that place that she had called home. But thinking of it as home hurts almost as much as thinking of those words, so she closes the door on those memories once more.

She closes the door on his words, too. Because it hurts to think of finding what she had looked for, here, of all places.

She smiles at Cassian, though, because even in times like these, even for people like them, there’s still a little bit of hope. She clings to that hope, even if she doesn't realize it. Not yet. Not with the dangers so close and the shadows around them so dark.

* * *

He says welcome home and she doesn't hear him.

She lay, closer to death than life, in the med bay, hooked up to countless machines, Every breath of hers a battle, every hour she lived a war won.

But Jyn had always been a fighter, more than she was anything else. Far more than she’d ever been a hero, at least in her own eyes. (The Rebellion, with Death Star plans in hand, might say otherwise)

So when she did hear him say it, not all of it, but that last word, that one thing she had searched for and longed for and been willing to die for once she’d found it, that word, _home, _she’d had enough reason to fight once more against impossible odds.

And she lived, like the fighter she was.

And he, like the spy he was, melted once more into the shadows, so that she thought, when she woke, she had only dreamed that he’d said it again.

The next time those words were said, they were droll and mechanical and utterly unamused, as a certain droid welcomed them to the safe house they were required to stay at, at least until they both healed, and until the dust settled in the Rebellion.

Surviving the impossible is all well and good, but it does make a certain amount of paperwork appear before an already overworked and overwhelmed princess. (Matters not helped by a certain smuggler putting his muddy boots right on her stack of datasheets.)

So, she sent them off to a nice, remote, relatively safe moon somewhere a little closer to the Core than any of the three of them felt comfortable being.

“If there’s one thing we have in common,” Jyn says, her own muddy boots on the table, and a cup of caf in one hand, “it’s that none of the three of us are cut out for Core World bullshit. Can you believe that lady at the market? Telling me I needed to say _please_ and _may I ask you a question _ instead of--”

“Barking _how much is all this shit?_ at her with the intensity of a rancor on the edge of starvation?” Cassian retorts, hip-checking her legs off the table, just as he sets down a steaming pot of-- _something_\-- she hadn’t asked, had actually rather doubted him when he’d claimed to be a good cook.

She’d told him that a Hutt once said to never trust a skinny chef.

He’d told her that if she’d rather go back to ration packets, she could be the first to fly back to the Rebellion and deal with the wrath of Leia.

In this one small thing, Jyn concedes she might have been wrong. Slightly. Because the food smells amazing.

And more than that, the food smells like _home._

Not that her parents ever cooked with these spices, which blossomed in her mouth like the stars streaking across a ship’s viewport as it made the jump to hyperdrive. Nor would they ever have made the rice the way he does or used vegetables like the ones he selects.

No, it wasn’t the taste, but it is the feeling. The warmth of a bowl in her hands, matched by the warmth in his eyes as he watches her take another helping. For the first time in so long, she’s allowed seconds, and thirds.

“Still regretting not going with Bodhi and the others to the monastic option?” he asks, as he sits down.

“I have been told the monastery has no prices,” K-2S0 adds, in that not-at-all-helpful way, “so you would not have to shout at anyone and demand to know prices.”

“You’re never going to let me forget that, are you?” she mutters.

“Never,” both man and droid say at the same time.

For a little while, home is a word that takes on a new meaning, there on that tiny moon, with the oddest of company.

For a little while, they all pretend home is a place that has an address, a fully stocked kitchen, and peace. They pretend that home is a place like it’s said to be in holobooks and songs, a place unlike any of their homes have ever been. They pretend, and what hurts all the more, is the pretending goes on long enough that they start to wonder if it might ever be true.

Because although they both can say the word (though she never says it when he’s around) neither of them truly believe it’s something that can last. Not for people like them. Not in times like this.

After all, despite the full kitchen pantry, despite the serene park that surrounds the cottage, and the peace of the small town nearby, the sharp realness of the world beyond this moon is all too present in their minds.

Both Jyn and Cassian find they can’t sleep in bedrooms, not any more, and move their mattresses to the one room without windows, the one room where they might be safe, sleeping back to back, blasters under pillows and one eye cracked, to wait for the dangers that always come in the shadows of the night.

* * *

The danger comes back, as they all knew it would. It’s a skirmish, them versus some scout troops who were dramatically underprepared for attempting to arrest those three. It's a skirmish but the blaster bolts burned into the walls ruin more than just the kitchen, they shatter the word _home_ as they'd come to understand it.

It’s a skirmish, but it’s enough for them to know that it’s time to stop pretending.

Even if their wounds aren’t fully healed, even if Cassian’s charge had been slowed by his limp, and Jyn’s formerly steady hands trembled a little, it was time.

Neither of them knew, though K-2S0 did (only because Threepio was such a gossip) that it wasn’t the physical wounds that had been the reason they’d been sent away.

It was the ones that went much deeper and would take far longer to heal.

Wounds that were torn open again as they become soldier and spy again, as they fought, not only on the battlefield, but with words, against each other, in the halls of the freezing cold base on Hoth.

“Reckless bastard,” she mutters to him, shouldering her blaster.

“Selfish brat,” Cassian returns the fire, matching glare for glare, even if he knew it was her going against command that had saved him this time. She had been safely in the med bay when he’d left. Now, she was headed back there, with worse wounds.

But he is alive, and he wouldn’t have been, if she hadn’t gone after him.

Cassian isn’t used to that. Not yet. He isn’t sure if he could ever get used to mattering more to someone than the Rebellion did to that person. He isn’t sure he was ready to be someone’s first priority. Maybe he’d never be ready.

“I’m not the one who’s too selfish to ask for help,” Jyn replies.

The intensity crackled between them, because what they said and what they had meant existed in two separate universes. There was a distance neither of them were willing to cross. Not in times like this. Not for people like them.

“Easy, lovebirds!” a certain smuggler calls out as he walked past them. “Keep up that smoldering at each other and you’ll melt this whole cursed ice cube.”

Odd that Han, of all people, knew that what both of them had meant was _it’s not a home if you’re not here._

Then again, Han wasn’t exactly one to judge when it came to speaking his true feelings, given some of his own mutterings to a certain princess in this same hallway.

Jyn shakes her head, not yielding the argument, but now unwilling to talk, with Han’s words floating in the air between them. The last thing she needed was more hope, more foolish thoughts to build stupid dreams upon. The last thing she needed, Jyn knew, was to care more about the person she already chose, again and again, above all else.“Let’s just get you in bacta and call it a day.”

Hoth became home for all of them, despite, perhaps, all of their better instincts. Hoth became home and that distance between them grew smaller each day.

But every night, Jyn and Cassian both slept with one eye open, waiting for the dangers that come when you let someone get closer than your better judgment would allow.

Both of them waited for the other one to take their home away, as had always happened before.

Both of them knew what happened when you started to trust in feelings like these, in times like this.

* * *

The first time Jyn says it, she doesn’t actually say it. Not in so many words. Because the way he says it, it’s a gift. Like all his gifts, from the holobooks he accidentally leaves in her cabin to the coat he’d decided was too small for him (and yet just right for her) it’s always unexpected and free of any farefare.

But like all Cassian’s gifts, when he gives them, he does so freely, without asking anything in return. He gives, and expects nothing, and gives again. He is generous, even in times like these.

Even to people like her.

Which is why she can’t say it to him, not the way he says it to her.

Even her words, like her gifts, are very different.

Her gifts, when she gives them, are gifts of time, wrapped in stealth. That way she can tell herself he won’t notice that the laundry has been done, or that his ship’s repairs had been completed ahead of schedule. Her gives are silent and simple, and more importantly, they’re never the same thing twice. She gives nothing he could ever get used to.That way, she tells herself, he’ll never notice her presence, so he won’t mourn her absence when she does leave.

Her words, that night, as she waits for him to return from the mission to find that damn fool Luke, lost in some stupid errand in the snowy wasteland outside the base, are very different from the words that Cassian has said.

Even if, just maybe, the meaning behind them is the same.

_Come home, _she says, so silent that even K-2S0, standing next to her, cannot hear them. They’re less a gift, these words, and more a demand. Not of him, but of the universe, which had taken so much from her already. She wouldn’t allow it to take him too.

Not even if the odds of his survival are some absurdly small number.

Not even if no one else has hope that he’ll survive.

No, not even in times like this.

_Come back home, _she says, and for the first time, she wonders if people like them are allowed to have such strong hope like this.

* * *

The next time it’s said, neither one is sure who says it first. Because this time, neither of them use words.

Because this time, the distance between them finally closes.

Because this time it’s different.

Because this time, for once, perhaps for always, the war is over.

Jyn rushes to him at the same speed Cassian moves toward her. They both think of saying it, both want to whisper those words that had come to mean so much, but neither of them do.

They both, too, want to know how the other one survived, how they found their way back, how… There are far too many questions that they both want answered, which, perhaps is why they remain unanswered.

Because neither of them is good at wanting things. Neither of them ever hoped with any certainty or dreamed with any conviction, that this wanting would be answered by the other.

It's foolish to want things, in times like this.

And it's dangerous for people like them to dream of times like this.

But both of them are in love, and when they say it, they say it simply, with a kiss, with an embrace that goes on for what feels like an eternity to both of them, as the other troops rush around them, removing weapons and gear for what may be the last time.

The distance has been crossed and that night, between Jyn and Cassian, nothing more needed to be said.

* * *

But Jyn does finally say it, years later, when he wakes up, startled, eyes wide, searching for the dangers in the night. He clenches the blankets, because there’s no blaster under his pillow and he doesn’t know what to do, how to be safe, without one.

Cassian searches for the darkness that hides in every shadow, the danger that always waited outside his door, but finds nothing.

There’s no dangers. Not for them. Not anymore.

Jyn reminds him of this, stroking his hair away from his brow and kissing his cheek. They’re safe now. The war is over and they have retired their wartime trades, replaced them with slightly less exciting, but far more survivable careers. They’re safe, here, in this comfortable bed, in this sturdy house, built with their own hands.

She tells him these things, watching as his gaze re-focuses on the walls he painted with murals of the mountains of his home planet and the rocking chair she carved from wood she salvaged. On the stacks of holobooks they have yet to read and the knitting he has yet to finish. Each thing a sign of that greatest luxury of all; free time.

What’s more important, is that they are not only safe, but they are happy. She tells him this gently, although with a few more explicatives than one might expect to hear in such a soothing tone. She tells him any number things, until the tension slides from his grip and he relaxes in her arms.

She tells him they’re allowed to be happy.

Yes, even people like them.

Even in times like this.

Jyn reminds him of this with those two words he once told her, and Cassian smiles, hears her, and then, believes her. He remembers now, as the haze of sleep flutters away, he remembers their life here, on this small planet, thankfully far from the Core. He remembers that they have more than enough food and enough blankets (even if she steals his in the night) and they have nearly forgotten what it feels like to be cold and hungry and bone-weary.

He remembers that he sleeps next to the window and rises when the three suns do, greeting their light with his own smile.

He remembers he has nothing to fear.

Not in times like this. Not with a love like theirs.

“Welcome home,” Jyn says.


End file.
